The Historic Challenge

Excerpts from the introduction and chapter one:

‘Babylon, mid-June 323 BCE, the ‘gateway of the gods’; an ancient city already two millennia old and which, according to legend, was founded by the Mesopotamian deity, Marduk. This was now the Macedonian campaign capital and the staging point for the planned expeditions to Arabia and westward to the Pillars of Heracles.

Inside the lofty baked-brick and bitumen-bound walls, the city had become a hive of activity with trepidatious envoys arriving from nations across the known world, those conquered and those expecting to be. Prostrated in the Summer Palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on the east bank of the Euphrates, wracked by fever and having barely survived another night, King Alexander III, the ruler of Macedonia for twelve years and seven months, had his senior officers congregate at his bedside. Abandoned by Tyche who governed fortune, and the healing god Asclepius, he finally acknowledged he was dying.’

‘Some 2,340 years on, five barely intact accounts survive to tell a hardly coherent story. At times in close agreement, though frequently in opposition, they conclude with a contradictory set of suspicious claims and death-scene rehashes. One portrayed Alexander dying silent and intestate; he was Homeric and vocal in another, whilst a third detailed his Last Will and Testament though it is attached to the end of a book of romance. Which account do we trust?’

‘As a rule, the orphaned, crippled, raped, betrayed, bankrupted, tortured and the left-behind had no historical voices. The eyewitness accounts of gnarled veterans, dispossessed townsfolk and mercenaries forced to resettle in the distant mud-brick Alexandrias at the ends of the empire, and the half-caste children conceived when the Macedonians swept through, had no forum nor papyrus for expression either. In Alexander’s day, and through the Hellenistic era, kings did, and those sponsored by kings did, and ultimately it is their voices we hear.’